Data Sharing and Verification for Certificates of Origin Based on Blockchain and Zero-Knowledge Proof

Abstract

Blockchain technology, as a representative paradigm of distributed ledgers, has been widely applied in cross-border trade and finance. However, in cross-border trade, issues such as privacy leakage, forgery, and data misuse during document data sharing hinder the receiving parties from verifying the authenticity of shared data. To address these problems, this paper proposes a decentralized and trustworthy data verification scheme based on the PLONK protocol in zk-SNARKs. Leveraging PLONK's universal trusted setup, the proposed system performs off-chain computation and on-chain verification. Sensitive trade data are processed with the Poseidon hash to generate commitments, which are then recorded on the blockchain for integrity verification. Arithmetic circuits are constructed to ensure that the committed data satisfy pre-defined validity constraints. Meanwhile, trusted institutions conduct off-chain audits to realize a minimal disclosure mechanism, ensuring privacy-preserving verification. Based on an analysis of verification requirements in certificate-of-origin scenarios, the system architecture and arithmetic circuits are designed and implemented to achieve secure, privacy-preserving, and verifiable data sharing in cross-border trade.